PLANT CITY COMPANY WINS AN AWARD FOR INNOVATION EVEN WHILE CLOSED.
For five years, NuCycle Energy has operated in a 103,000 square-foot facility on County Line Road. At the end of February, the company won the Florida Sustany Foundation’s Best Medium-Sized Sustainable Business award. NuCycle’s business is landfill abatement, and fossil fuel replacement.
“NuCycle Energy was started by someone who is much smarter than me,” Mark Barasch, CEO, said. “What we are doing is a dual-edged mission, first, of diverting material and precluding it from getting into a landfill—which we all know is a societal issue in Hillsborough County, in Florida, in the United States of America, and across the globe. This is a problem. We have too much material that we waste out as a society. We can’t avoid it. It is nobody being a bad guy, it is how things developed.” Every pound of material that is routed to the NuCycle plant is a diversion from a landfill. What they use is a very specific part of the waste stream. The company takes in clean paper, plastic, styrofoam, bubble wrap, cardboard, shrink wrap, and wood. The second part of the mission is the NuCycle process that shreds these materials then compresses them into its Enviro-Fuel Cube™ — a product burned for energy by industries. Because of this end use, the cube has to have very specific technical parameters and specifications. For example, it can’t have an excess of moisture. Also, there are maximum thresholds for the amount of chlorine, florine, and bromine that is in the fuel cube, and therefore only certain materials can go into it.
Among other companies, Walgreens, Tropicana Field, Pepperidge Farm, Coca Cola, the Orange County Convention Center, The City of Lakeland, and all nine Walmart distribution centers in Florida divert their specified waste materials to NuCycle. The product, the fuel cubes goes into the kilns of Cemex, Quikcrete, Ashgrove Cement, and the power plant in Brooksville.
One thing that makes the fuel cube better than sub-bituminous coal is its lower toxicity related to Clean Air Act toxic pollutants like sulfur and mercury. The Enviro-Fuel Cube has a non-waste determination from the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Pound for pound and ton for ton, it produces essentially the same power while emitting 1/60th the mercury, 1/60th the sulfur, and 1/13th the lead that burning coal does.
The Enviro-Fuel Cube is also two-thirds carbon neutral since the carbon in the cube is two-thirds biogenetically sourced. Only 35% of the carbon comes from fossil-fuel sources—the plastic. “We use the plastic because the plastic is what boosts the fuel up to 10,000 Btus, so it can do its job and replace coal,” Barasch commented. “Coal is 100 percent fossil fuel, and that is what is added to our atmosphere. The two-thirds of our carbon that came from trees is considered carbon neutral because it is not added to the atmosphere. That tree that decays in the woods—if no one did anything about it—its carbon would end up in the atmosphere. So when we burn carbon from trees, we are not adding to the atmosphere’s balance sheet, in terms of carbon, in the same way we are when we burn coal.”
Every pound of the Enviro-Fuel Cube is replacing 97/100ths of a pound of coal. It is almost one-for-one. A pound of coal used by these industries burns at approximately 11,000 Btus per pound. “Our fuel burns at between 10,000 and 11,000 Btus per pound,” Brasch said. “Therefore it is a 95 to 97 percent replacement for the heat. I refer to it as a pound-for-a-pound, and a ton-for-a-ton replacement, because that is a rounding error….That is why our fuel is attractive to these industries, because it does have this high Btu value. It’s a phenomenal concept. I am pretty enthusiastic about the company…I look at the opportunity to run this particular company as, ‘I won the job lottery.’ I have gone so far as to say if I won the monetary lottery, I would probably take a week off, then come back and run the company—because what the heck else am I going to do? If I have the ability to have my own time, what could I do that would be more productive with my time?”
The NuCycle concept could scale to wherever there is a dense population, since urban areas have a problem with adding to landfills, and the population needs power. NuCycle sits at the intersection of environmental sustainability and economic viability, “That intersection, obtained, is an unstoppable force,” Barasch said. “If we become a viable part of the fabric of the way society deals with these two problems—needing energy that is cleaner than what we are used to using, and keeping material out of the landfill—then that is our contribution to society….then society will support it economically.”
NuCycle Energy is a company that is privately held by investors. The past four months haven’t been smooth sailing for the business. On December 21, Plant City Fire Rescue answered the call to a structure fire at NuCycle’s facility. Crews found heavy smoke inside the structure. The battalion chief and incident commander, knowing the building and its contents, quickly requested mutual aid assistance from Hillsborough County Fire Rescue. As the incident evolved and expanded, additional resources were requested from multiple agencies, including Tampa, Lakeland, Polk, and Pasco County. After the fire was quenched, the subsequent investigation revealed that a large lithium battery was in a load of material that came into the building. The battery ignited and started the fire. The fire and necessary water to put out the blaze caused major damage to infrastructure, and the loss of tons of material (remember, it can’t be moist). The first priority, manufacturing, resumed on February 26. The restoration of the offices and the rest of the building have been completed, and the grand reopening is March 21.
